As the whole student and staff body would know, Harding High School has had its fair share of issues with the internet since coming back from winter break. On more than one occasion, we even had to be warned about the wifi being down over the announcements. Some teachers even thought we’d have to switch back to pen and paper! But thankfully, it’s all over.
The cause of all these internet issues is mostly just age. We’ve had fiber internet for 24 years, and never has it fully been replaced before until recently. Other than that, the fibers would get broken up by weather, car crashes, and animal chews (which would cause the network to go down), to the point were we had no more extra fibers to replace the damage. Sometimes it would cause the main switch in the network to go down as well.
This main switch is called the “Root Bridge” which makes all the decisions. When it goes down, the other switches have to stop whatever they are supposed to be doing to select a new Root Bridge. Usually while this was happening, another switch would go down, starting a whole new selection process. This usually made the network go down for 8 minutes at a time. This process also backed up the network, and took up all the memory the switches could hold, so the error of a switch going down would not be recorded.
The fix to our internet issues was running new fiber in the building and out onto the utility poles outside. The new fiber was run sometime between January 29th and February 6th, and around January 15th the fiber company ran the fiber from the school to the pole.
This fix might seem like it cost a pretty penny; we actually didn’t have to pay for the fiber that was run, just for the service of running it. This ended up costing about five thousand dollars in vendor fees.
Now the only thing left to wonder about is how certain hallways would go down instead of the whole school. Scott Croskey, our schools technology support, commented on this, saying, “We have thirteen [technology] closets basically, there's one in every hallway. So if the problem occurred in that switch in the hallway, then the only people who were affected when I turn that switch off is those people…” This explains why sometimes the internet would go down in the English hallway, and not the whole school.
Fortunately, or unfortunately for the students, the network is back in working order! Teachers can go back to assigning work online, and we don’t have to worry about going back in time, to pen and paper.